Update: This project was dead, but it's back! Unfortunately my daytime job keeps me somewhat busy, so don't expect the project to emerge in a couple of years.
Saya is a programming project aimed to create a cross-platform, versatile, extensible Nonlinear video editor with features available in commercial editors like Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas or Edius Pro. The project was started in June, 2008, died in 2009 and was revived in October 2010.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Edius Pro rocks!

Now *THIS* is something that I was talking about. I just downloaded a few tutorials and ads for Canopus' Edius Pro from youtube, and they have these cool features:

* The toolbox above the timeline has these little icons that when you hover over them, you get a tooltip with the Brief description (as in the Menu) AND the accelerator shortcut key!* The resources window lets you scan a directory and they recreate a directory tree with all the resources of each directory in another pane - with icons, of course.* According to the ad, you can jog by just moving the mouse in a circular motion. I ignore if this is by just clicking in the window or use a knob-like jog dial.

But this is the kind of features that I kept asking for in overhyped editors like Jahshaka. What effort did these guys need to make a friggin' tooltip appear in front of a tool? Or a small context menu that explained to me what each button did? These things are CHILD'S PLAY to do, at least in wxWidgets. And why do programmers leave these things FOR THE END, if they're the EASIEST things to do?

So this is why I started my project. Instead of starting with the backend image processing stuff, I'll start with the front end and add all these basic features that make Video Editing "just work". If later some guy makes a super-duper Video Editor technology, he'll just have to use Saya's frontend, and no problem. Of course, provided that I have managed to write an extensible interface for making your own effect dialogs - which I intend to do. But I disgress.

Now that I've seen how Edius works, I'm going to use Edius' resources Window as model, instead of Premiere's (and possibly I'll start searching for more Edius screencasts ;-) ). If only open source programmers learned not to reinvent the wheel...